Information on the Legislature's work on the Governor's proposed budget

The Joint Standing Committee on Appropriations and Financial Affairs (AFA) held public hearings on Governor Mill’s proposed FY19 supplemental budget this week. Joined by the relevant policy committees AFA took testimony from Commissioner Figeroa and other members of the administration as well as members of the public.

Important items in the supplemental include

State share of federal disaster funds for municipalities- $2.5M

Funding for unachieved position attrition savings from small state agencies- $2.9M

Funding for the Maine Bicentennial celebration- $1M

Non-General Fund (GF) money to support cases pursued by the Office of the Public Advocate- $320K

Funds to lease accessible voting machines- $400K

The repeal of a two-year lifetime limit on prescriptions for medication assisted treatment (MAT) for the treatment of addiction

Language to allow the creation of the Washington County Prerelease Center

Testimony from the Commissioner and testimony regarding disaster funds and the Office of the Public Advocate (OPA) can be found here.

As an experiment I am enabling comments on this post in order to answer questions about what is or is not in the enacted budget. I will be the sole arbiter of what constitutes a question and what does not. This may not be a consistent judgement. If this goes south I will pull the plug.

A further note, I am doing this at my own motivation with my own or publicly available resources. Like the entire blog this is not a project of either the Office of the Speaker of the House or the Maine Legislature. It is not a government enterprise. I will answer what I can, when I can and to the extent that I can. Questions must pertain to content of the budget and do not include, “What were they thinking?, Are you crazy?”, etc…

Early on the morning of July 4, 2017 the Legislature enacted and the governor signed into law a state budget for the FY 2018-2019 biennium. This ended the 3 day shut down of state government. Below are documents related to the Committee’s of Conference used to reach this conclusion. The chaptered law and its fiscal note are also available. Further, here is a set of School funding estimates produced by the Maine Education Association. Predictably, the Maine Department of Education declined to offer its assistance in providing this information to the Legislature and the public.

As you are likely now aware, members of the Appropriations Committee came to work on Friday and began the long process of voting the biennial budget line by line. They worked an incredibly long day and well into the night and just finished voting after 1:00 AM

At the end, Democrats issued a majority report focusing our efforts on retaining property tax relief for working families, full funding of K-12 public education and protecting our most vulnerable people.

Senate and House Republicans split, issuing two Republican reports. The House Republicans supported the governor’s education plan. Neither report provided any new revenue to replace the 3% surcharge they propose repealing.

What will happen next is a renewed effort and commitment to continue working on the budget through the AFA committee, while leaders also work to close the gap on our differences surrounding funding of public education.

Below, please find a summary of a few of the initiatives approved or changed in the Appropriations Committee.

Increases investment in Maine students, schools, and teachers and full funding of K-12 public education at $320 million, as demanded by voters TWICE.

Bolsters property tax relief: Rejected an elimination of the Homestead exemption for most families, as originally proposed in Administration budget.